July 13, 2007

Backscratching in Our Time, Jeffrey Eugenides and Jonathan Safran Foer

Jeffrey Eugenides on Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated: “Great humor, sympathy, charm and daring … Every page is illuminated.” Jeffrey Eugenides on the dust jacket of the hardcover edition of Everything Is Illuminated

Jonathan Safran Foer on Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex: “Whatever you might be expecting, Middlesex will surprise you … a roiling epic … the kind of book that urges to be read in one day, then reread.” Jonathan Safran Foer in Bombwww.bombsite.com/eugenides/eugenides.html
and quoted in the front matter of the paperback edition of Middlesex

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It’s hard for me to have any respect to blurbs. I know the give and take that goes on, and it disgusts me. (I, however, adore Jeffrey Eugenides and have no prob with him blurbing books. I just pay no attention to it.)

Pooks: I generally ignore them, too. The exception might be if I see a blurb from an author who is known for never giving blurbs. But even then, I’m cautious. The blurber might have felt put on the spot in a way most of us will never know. This also relates to the the comment below.

Tom: Blurbs can originate in many ways. The editor, the agent or the author of a book can ask someone for a blurb. In my experience the editor is most likely to make the request.

Let’s say the editor of new book by an unknown writer also edits Famous Author X. The editor might ask the famous author for a blurb for the book by the unknown writer. And if the editor has paid you hundreds of thousands of dollars — or you love the editor and want him or her to buy your next book — the request can be hard to turn down. So there’s often reason to be especially skeptical of blurbs from authors published by the same house.

Still, some authors resist the pressure. I can’t recall ever having seen a blurb by John Updike (though I have seen quotes from his reviews in The New Yorker). No author HAS to give a blurb, so I’m not sure why some of them are so promiscuous about it.
Jan